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COMMON SCRIPT FOR ALL LANGUAGES | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Questions About Your Target Languages |  | |
| obara Newbie India subramanian-obula.blRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5974 days ago 21 posts - 22 votes Studies: Gujarati | Message 17 of 40 23 August 2008 at 10:53pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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I am concerned with evolution of common script where all symbols are available for all sounds that occur in all languages.
Then we can select the symbols required to learn a particular language[spoken form only]. Then writing at least 100 [or more] questions and answers thereof pertaining to each situation. This is mainly useful for tourist visiting many countries where a number of languages are spoken. Then translation of those sentences from source language to target language printed in common script. Of course, the questions may not be the same in each language. We can modify the question according to the requirement of the target language. The ultimate aim should be to understand well what the other person utters. We are not concerned with the difficulty or easiness of a particular script. Those who want to go through the literature of a particular language, necessarily have to learn the script of that particular language. Some universal organization should come forward to execute the project. Linguists of different language are to sit together and evolve the World Common Script. Persons engaged in evolving UNICODE font for each language should evince interest in this project. Academics should also come forward to coordinate and execute this project.Respective Governments should also finance for the execution of this project. The ultimate aim is free mobility of the people to all countries and to increase their knowledge about their counter parts living in other countries. I will be happy if my dream comes true. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| autodidactic Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United States tinyurl.com/cunningl Joined 6631 days ago 100 posts - 110 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish*, French Studies: Russian, Japanese, Kazakh | Message 18 of 40 24 August 2008 at 12:04pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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Leosmith seems to be quite the pessimist in several threads. I learned the arabic alphabet in matter of hours with this book:
http://www.amazon.com/Arabic-Alphabet-How-Read-Write/dp/0818 404302/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1219595999&sr=8-1 It teaches in a non-alphabetical order, teaching you to distinguish letters that are only different by one dot or two, learning letters similar to each other in pairs/groups. I learned the hiragana in a few days. Definitely not a month. I learned to recognize all the hiragana with this book: http://www.amazon.com/Remembering-Hiragana-Complete-Yourself -Syllabary/dp/0870407651/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1219 596199&sr=8-1 The author claims you can do it in 3 hours, I took longer than that because I didn't have 3 hours in a row to myself, but after reading the book I just started typing with microsofts IME, checking out samples of japanese hiragana from the web, and in no time started learning it. By the end of the week I could listen to japanese pimsleur and sound out/spell many of the things from the course with my keyboard on an open word screen. Now, the kanji is a different story. The author of the book series claims you can learn it in a month if you study full time(8 hours a day), but the author was like a japanese prodigy, so I don't have high hopes for that, or the time. Finally, there was no fancy technique for cyrillic. I learned it nitty gritty from course books and audio samples online and got used to it in a matter of days. It's quite easy actually to the point where your mind gets into cyrillic mode and stumbles if you try to spell out the "romanization" of a russian word. I'm not fluent in either 3 of these languages, the script is just an entity of them that is a lot easier to learn than spoken language. What I'm saying is, dont call BS on other people so easily, If I can learn them so fast Im sure others have learned it a lot faster. Edited by autodidactic on 24 August 2008 at 12:06pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| furrykef Senior Member United States furrykef.com/ Joined 6480 days ago 681 posts - 862 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Japanese, Latin, Italian | Message 19 of 40 24 August 2008 at 12:58pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
If you think that, you've never had encoding problems with your computer where programs will just give you gibberish symbols instead of the foreign script you're supposed to be reading. This happens all the time, and it's because of idiotic or lazy programmers who simply can't be bothered to program their software to work with more than their native alphabet. Such people will always exist. I'm not saying that we should unify all language's scripts, but I think "absolutely no point" is not the case.
Your definition of "learn" and "most important kanji" must be very different from mine...
Well, that's not an entirely fair argument, because nobody writes in Classical Chinese anymore except for fun, and, because phonetic writing represents speech, there is nothing that can be said in spoken Chinese that cannot be said in pinyin. Chinese speakers do find pinyin hard to read, but that's just because they're not used to it except for certain words in isolation. Replace each letter of the Latin alphabet with an arbitrary hanzi, and you'd find English hard to read too -- until you got used to it. I think the argument that Chinese and Japanese have too many homonyms is nonsensical, because if that were the case, Chinese- and Japanese-speaking people would only understand each other in writing and not in speech. Incidentally, the International Phonetic Alphabet is a rather poor alphabet to write a language with. If people wrote English in IPA, you'd find that everybody would have different spellings because they have different pronunciations. (This is one reason why English spelling reform is very unlikely to happen: changes that are fair to one dialect are unfair to another due to pronunciation differences.) If an American man travels to Britain, he will find that, depending on where he is in Britain, people may be extremely easy or extremely hard to understand -- but all will read and write standard English. If they wrote in IPA using their own dialect, those incomprehensible in speech would become incomprehensible in writing, too. If instead everyone is instructed to write in some particular dialect of English instead of their own, you again achieve unity in the writing system, but then part of the point of using IPA in the first place is lost. - Kef Edited by furrykef on 24 August 2008 at 1:05pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6447 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 20 of 40 24 August 2008 at 8:08pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
I have indeed had that problem. Charsets and encodings are another kettle of fish, and are a problem even with only one alphabet. See: ASCII, EBCDIC, 'wide Latin' in Unicode, etc. The situation with Cyrillic is even messier. It would be nice if one alphabet implied one encoding, and everyone would stick to it and all programs would use it, but even if everyone magically started using the same alphabet tomorrow, I don't think this would occur within my lifetime. Legacy data can be a huge pain. People messing up Unicode support is another rant. I'd rather not go into it.
Conceded. I should have said "I believe the benefits are easy to overstate, and that there are significant drawbacks".
I'm thinking in terms of Heisig, meaning roughly the most important 2000 or so. By "learn", I mean "able to write and recognize at least one meaning of". That doesn't mean understanding all the meanings or compounds - if I start a new language using the Latin alphabet, I won't magically understand all the meanings or compounds of words I know one definition of either. For Japanese, knowing which reading to use is also a hurdle; for Chinese, this is much less of an issue. Personally, I 'learned' over 500 kanji via Heisig quite a while ago. I forget how much time I spent, but it was somewhere between half a week and 2 weeks, and I wasn't working particularly intensively. And, while I seem to be citing furyou_gaijin way too often recently, he said that he learned the top 6000 hanzi in 4 months, and believed that it could be done in two. Learning the writing system is not the same thing as becoming fluent in the language. It's not even close. To use another somewhat unfair analogy: I'm fluent in English, but there are words I can read but not pronounce correctly, and words that I cannot look up in a dictionary because I have no idea how to spell them upon hearing them. This doesn't mean that I'm not extremely comfortable with the Latin alphabet. It would also be a little ridiculous to claim that I don't know "the English writing system". The situation with Chinese/Japanese is similar (not identical), though my level of knowledge of the languages is much, much poorer.
Indeed. With English, this would be bad. With Arabic or Chinese, it would be far worse. Edited by Volte on 24 August 2008 at 8:09pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6447 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 21 of 40 24 August 2008 at 8:29pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
By some measures, I am smarter than the average person, but that's an incredibly small factor here. What matters is technique. Cyrillic is easy, if you approach it reasonably. I decided to try to learn it by listening and reading Russian at the same time (without using English - 'step 2' of L-R). It happened to work. In less than a few hours (I didn't time it), in a few sessions, I was fairly comfortable following along, matching the Cyrillic and audio. By the end of my 45 hours of Russian on my vacation (spread over two weeks), I could easily do things like find my place again when I'd gotten interrupted, scanning over paragraphs of Cyrillic text. This didn't correspond to where I was before the interruption, either because I'd rewind (by a rather inexact amount; I was often off by a few minutes) or I could have missed up to a few minutes of audio. Am I as comfortable in Cyrillic as I am with the Latin alphabet? Absolutely not; I've been using the latter for decades. Can I sound out words written in Cyrillic, skim text in it, pick out some common words immediately without sounding them out letter by letter, etc? Yes. Even in a new language using the Latin alphabet, I need to pay much closer attention to the individual letters than I do when reading freely in a language I know well; Cyrillic exacerbates this, but it's a difference of degree, not an entirely new problem. Next: the kana. If you approach these stupidly, as I did, it's possible to go for years without learning them. I'd rather not disclose how many hours I spent on various kana-drilling games, but it's an obscene number - and I still didn't know them afterward. On the other hand, people using mnemonic techniques report taking as little as 1-6 hours to learn them (to the point where they can sound out words, kana by kana). I'd say that the Arabic and Persian abjads are more difficult than the kana, but another poster in this thread mentioned learning them quickly. I discussed what I meant for the Kanji and Hanzi in my previous post in this thread. So far, I've found two techniques that work: - listening while matching what you hear to what you see. It worked well for Cyrillic; I'd question using it for a logographic writing system, but I haven't tried. - heavy use of mnemonics, and 'seeing things' within the writing system. For kana, this can be a matter of knowing which logographs they evolved from; for Kanji/Hanzi, making stories involving the radicals/components seems to be the key factor. Both are somewhat prone to fading through disuse. I've also found several techniques that don't work, for me: - drilling visual recognition (ie, via quiz games) - copying characters out robotically (even for simple systems, like the kana) - expecting the writing system to just sink in (even for simple systems) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6447 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 22 of 40 24 August 2008 at 8:33pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
You learn keymaps much faster than I do, then. I've been working on learning to touch-type Cyrillic for the last few days. I can do about 90 characters/minute on the 11 letters on the home row at this point. The program I'm using introduces 2 or 3 letters at a time, advancing to the next set when I reach 120 characters/minute; I can maintain speeds over 120 for the 8 characters I don't move my fingers for. I'm finding it about as hard to learn to touch-type Cyrillic as I did to learn to touch-type Dvorak; I expect it to be another few weeks until I'm truly comfortable with it. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6558 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog | Message 23 of 40 24 August 2008 at 10:21pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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I see what you mean Volte. To me, learning a script means being able to read it and write it "normally". For
example, picking up a book and reading a passage. Or being able to write what you heard someone say. Being able to do flashcards, typing with a computer, etc are good start, but fall short of "learned" IMO. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| obara Newbie India subramanian-obula.blRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5974 days ago 21 posts - 22 votes Studies: Gujarati | Message 24 of 40 24 August 2008 at 11:22pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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It seems, the discussion is going on not on WORLD COMMON SCRIPT meant for acquiring SPOKEN LANGUAGE, but on the difficulty or easiness of a particular script pertaining to a particular language.
Please stick to the discussion of evolving the COMMON SCRIPT. IPA symbols should be recast. Additional symbols are to be added to represent the sounds of a particular language. The symbols should have aesthetic look and easy for handwriting. So I request the forumers to discuss on what more symbols can be added to existing list of International Phonetic Alphabets [IPA], giving details of additional symbols required for writing a particular sound which is not available. Please give example. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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